At almost every inflection point in my career, I knew at least one designer who was convinced the new thing was the death of the art form.
Photoshop was going to end traditional illustration. Web-based builders were going to make designers obsolete. Drag-and-drop tools were going to commoditize everything. Stock photography was going to kill original visual thinking. And now AI. AI is going to end creativity itself, replace human designers entirely, produce a world of machine-generated sameness from which genuine artistry cannot survive.
None of the previous ones were right. I don't think this one is either.
The Rise of Fast Design and What We Lose Because of It
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A client’s guide: practical answers for people hiring a designer or building a site.
What human design offers that AI can’t replicate
Making your website work harder, for your business and in search
The craft: what makes things look and feel right
The why: how design makes people think, feel, and trust
Typography is one of the most felt and least understood elements of design. Most people can’t tell you why one website feels elevated and another feels cheap. They can’t name the fonts involved or explain the technical decisions behind them. But they feel the difference immediately, in the first second, before they’ve read a word, […]
There is an entire category of merchandise built around the idea that the modern brain is running too many tabs at once. Mugs, tee shirts, tote bags, all variations on the same joke: 47 tabs open, half of them frozen, nobody knows which one is making that noise. It’s funny because it’s accurate. And it’s […]
the designer
Nicole has been in design for thirty years, across television, advertising, academia, and now this. Every Kismet project runs through her from start to finish.
It was always going to end up here. It just took thirty years to figure it out.
